Fourteen kilometres of water separate Europe from Africa here
The Strait of Gibraltar pinches the Atlantic into the Mediterranean and Europe toward Africa. At its narrowest the gap is only 7.7 nautical miles—14.2 kilometres—and ferries can cross in as little as thirty-five minutes across depths of roughly 300 to 900 metres.
Spain and Gibraltar hold the northern shore; Morocco and Spanish Ceuta face them from Africa. The name traces to Arabic Jabal Ṭāriq—“Tariq’s Mount”—after Tariq ibn Ziyad; Latin writers remembered Fretum Herculeum and the Pillars of Hercules. Medieval Arabic also called it Bāb al-maghrib, the Gate of the West. UNCLOS guarantees transit passage for foreign ships and aircraft through this choke point shared by Moroccan, Spanish, and British waters.
Around 5.97 million years ago Atlantic–Mediterranean connections along the Betic and Rifan corridors shut, driving Messinian salinity crises that left gypsum and salt on the seafloor. Were the strait sealed today, most Mediterranean water would evaporate within about a thousand years. Dense salty Mediterranean bottom water still spills west over the Camarinal Sill while fresher Atlantic water floods in above—an exchange that can spawn internal waves. In World War II, German U-boats rode those currents silently; sixty-two entered the Mediterranean from September 1941 to May 1944, nine sunk near Gibraltar.
Neanderthals lived around the strait from about 125,000 years ago, and the Rock of Gibraltar may have been one of their final refuges, with traces as late as 24,000 years ago; modern humans appear roughly 40,000 years ago. Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals and Moors all used the short hop between continents, but after a Spanish force toppled the last Muslim government north of the water in 1492, the strait came to divide a Christian, Spanish-speaking north from an Arabic-speaking Muslim south, with British Gibraltar, ceded at Utrecht, as a third culture. Hundreds of thousands of seabirds, including Balearic shearwaters and Atlantic puffins, migrate through each year, and a resident pod of about 36 orcas lives here, threatened by long-term PCB pollution. Spain and Morocco began discussing a tunnel in the 1980s and in December 2003 agreed to study an undersea rail link.
Source: Strait of Gibraltar
